Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Contract Cheating - What We Should Do About It

How Contract Cheating Works

Contract cheating providers make students believe that if they
use the services they are being smart students who will deliver
what their professors want such as a 10 page paper or an excellent score on the final exam.
Students may also believe that if they use these services, they will be
able to deliver what their parents want (good grades) and what employers
want (a degree) (Gallant, Oct. 5, 2016).

Why Do Students Use Contract Cheating Services?

The underlying reasons may
be complex and are shaped by individual and situational factors,
but perhaps at the heart of it, contract cheating providers deliver
services that we do not -“help” on their academic work 24 hours per day,
7 days a week (Gallant). Students often do not work on their
assignments between 9 and 7, Monday-Thursday and 9 to 2 on Fridays, when the Student Success Center offers assistance in the Writing and Tutoring Center. So where else can students go when they need help?

Gallant (2016) wrote that students often use Google
to find things and when she Googled “essay writing help”, the 7th hit was “strategies for essay writing” from Harvard’s Writing Center and the 25th hit was Purdue’s Owl site, but the rest of the hits were all possible contract cheating sites.

Essay “help” is just the beginning. Many of these contract
cheating companies or freelancers, will offer to take exams or entire
courses for your students (whether online or in person). Be aware that contract cheating providers exist, they exist to
serve your students, and your students are using them. Brad Wolverton,
in “The New Economy of Cheating”
(Chronicle of Higher Education, August 28, 2016, subscription
required), estimates that the annual revenue for one of the largest
contract cheating providers is “in the millions”. The UK’s Quality
Assurance Agency (QAA) “Plagiarism in Higher Education” (August 2016) report also posits that the industry is expansive, likely involving thousands of students every year (Gallant).

Should We Do Something About It?

We must do something about it! Gallant (2016) argued that this type of fraud
perpetrated on the public, on employers, and on the government, could
crash the knowledge economy. The knowledge economy is built on education
credentials, specifically who has the grades and certifications needed
to fill the jobs that fuel the economy. If these grades and
certifications are fraudulent, the jobs are filled by incompetent people
at best, and ethically challenged people at worst (Gallant).

Survey studies have found that people who cheat in school are more
likely to cheat at work, and since the rates of cheating are high (as
high as 41% in some studies), that means that at least 41% of those
being hired have cheated in school. And since less than 1% of students
at most schools are reported for cheating, that means that at least 40%
of new graduates being hired have learned that cheating is a strategy
for success, perhaps even for “excellence” (Gallant).

If students are taking grants and loans from the government to pay
others to do their work for them, then our taxpayer dollars are being
squandered. According to Gallant, we should be morally outraged about the
fraud perpetrated by these contract cheating providers and the students
who use them.

What Can We Do About It?

Respond to cheating when it is detected in order to leverage it as a teachable moment and to ebb the normalizing of the practice.

Refer students to the academic and language support services available through the Student Success Center so that they don't feel the need to do business with contract cheating providers.

Create your own bank of questions for exams rather than relying on question banks written by the textbook publishers. These test banks are often available on the internet and available for purchase or for free.

Utilize authentic and alternative assessments and link them to solid learning objectives and integrity standards.

Employ methods to ensure that the people taking your classes and exams are the same people enrolled in the class.

Join the International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating

October 19th is Carnegie's Global Ethics Day. Join and receive an Institutional Toolkit with more specific tips and ideas for preventing and detecting contract cheating.